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Any person may sell or peddle the products of the farm or garden occupied and cultivated by him without obtaining a license therefor... What’s wrong with Charlotte’s farmers markets? Value Added Products - The future for farms of all sizes? Many farmers have felt the pinch of falling food prices over the past year. Some sectors of the ag industry, especially dairy, are in a free fall, with our fellow farm friends hurting badly as low prices, consolidation, and other forces forcing many to... What’s wrong with Charlotte’s farmers markets? Value Added Products - The future for farms of all sizes? Many farmers have felt the pinch of falling food prices over the past year. Some sectors of the ag industry, especially dairy, are in a free fall, with our fellow farm friends hurting badly as low prices, consolidation, and other forces forcing many to...

There are many factors that can influence corn yield. In fact, Fred Below, a plant physiologist at the University of Illinois, identified seven of them, which he dubbed the “Seven Wonders of the Corn Yield World. ”The seven wonders, ranked in order of most influence on yield, are:WeatherNitrogenHybridPrevious cropPlant populationTillageGrowth regulatorsWhile Below was referring to the cash crop rotation in the fourth wonder, some farmers are taking it one step further by seeding cover crops... “If I can save those passes, I’m avoiding compaction and it’s not costing me anything... We farm about 4,000 acres and most of our fields are anywhere from 100-200 acres a plot...

Traditional agricultural skills that made civilization possible are still alive and in use today. At the same time, hundreds of farm technician job listings across the US, and the rise of precision agriculture and software, clearly evidence the need for technologically-savvy farm technicians in the 21st century agricultural industry. It’s no surprise that tech-friendly millennials interested in farming are encouraged by these developments, which may make farming less labor intensive than in generations past... ” Since that time, John’s family farm has not undergone any “fundamental change in the daily operation of the business... ” As Joel explained, these obstacles “keep many would-be farmers from being successful, because most of us hate paperwork and just want to farm...

The irony is that with less people involved in agriculture, there has been an increasing reliance on information and technology in production... Our current product is what many people would call a social media “platform... For example, there’s a local irrigation company in my area that used AgFuse to remind its customers about pre-season irrigation maintenance by posting a checklist document to their company’s group page... And, we won’t be selling your data to any third parties... This feature allows any user to write long-form articles that can be hosted and shared not only across the AgFuse platform but also across all other social media platforms...

“It’s going to eat anything that is carbon based and basically turn it into carbon dioxide, thereby reducing soil carbon, and by definition, soil organic matter. So anything dead it’s going to decompose pretty rapidly and turn into CO2... In addition to organic matter increasing, Kloot discovered that nutrient levels and pH on the five farmers’ soils were quite stable — remaining practically unchanged, despite being in full production and not having any commercial fertilizer applied, except for nitrogen to grass crops, which Kloot says was typically applied at lower rates... 5% without any manure, while another working in a loamy sand soil saw his levels increase from 1% to 1... Kloot says that while species like grass crops tend to bring more carbon into the soil because they have more biomass, continuously growing grasses without any additional diversity will cause productivity in the soil to go down...

In the past few years, we have made a concerted effort to increase the usage of cover crops and other conservation practices on our farm. I have learned a lot of lessons from this experience but one stands out above the rest. Being a good steward of the environment and aiming to produce high yields don’t have to be mutually exclusive... The cornerstone of any good crop production system involving conservation techniques is the establishment of cover crops... Despite other stave heights being full, you can’t fill the barrel with water any higher than the most limiting stave...

And Accompanying Crop Rotations What Is Equipment Efficiency? What Scale-Related Questions Do You Need to Ask Yourself? When Does It Make Sense to Add Equipment? Part 1: Know Your True Cost of Production Want to make more money farming in 2019? Step one is to know your true cost of production (TCOP)... You may not know what the markets are going to do in any given growing season, but knowing your TCOP can make sales decisions easier and more profitable... The good news is that, once you’ve done this exercise for your farm, you can review the numbers annually and make quick changes by tweaking any necessary information about your operation... There are so many emotional factors that come into play with marketing and these can cause you to miss the forest for the trees... If I don’t have any price alerts and a new marketing month has come into play, my calendar reminder helps with making any necessary defensive sales...

Over time, you can check those measurements on the stakes to see how little soil you’re losing, if any, compared to the fields that are bare... To take a soil compaction reading, Arriaga recommends first taking a reading in a fencerow or somewhere with the same soil type hasn’t had any traffic on it, which would give you a good comparison of the soil’s natural compaction... Stott notes that if you’re located in a northern area, you shouldn’t be too worried if you don’t see too many earthworms... Anything that’s from a glaciated area, the earthworms are not native. So don’t worry if you don’t see any earthworms, it does not mean your soil is bad...

In 1995, Pennsylvania farmer Steve Groff was speaking at an event when he asked the audience the question: Do cover crops pay off?His thinking at the time was that he had been no-tilling since 1982, and maybe if he no-tilled long enough, he wouldn’t need them... While covers can help any soil, Groff, who now runs a cover crop consulting business, says that cover crops seem to help a poorer soil quicker... “If they’re in no-till and they don’t have any significant erosion problems, then they may not notice that kind of benefit... “I know some of our weed scientists at Purdue get very concerned with people saying ‘You’ve got cover crops, you don’t need any kind of herbicide or weed control, that’s all you need,’” she says... Anyone starting out with cover crops should find a mentor, and that doesn’t necessarily have to be a personal relationship, Groff says...

But did you know that for many crops, those roots aren’t working alone?That’s because most plant species associate with mycorrhizal fungi... Although there are many different types of mycorrhizae, the only one crop farmers need to be concerned about is arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), as 65% of plant species associate with it... And barring anything extreme that’s happened to your fields — such as mining or a toxic spill — your soils should already have AMF in it, says Miranda Hart, a soil microbial ecologist at the University of British Columbia... 26,” explains that while root hairs can only extend a few millimeters, the hyphae of some AMF can extend many centimeters away... When Mycorrhizae Becomes ParasiticWhile AMF can provide many benefits for plants, Cahill says that in some situations the relationship can be parasitic...